#oneaday Day 891: Joystick

Back home. Tired and have a headache, but I can probably think of something to write about for this evening before collapsing into bed. Oh, here we go, I have something.

One of the things I rediscovered during my trip to the Retro Computer Festival at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge yesterday is how much fun it is to play old computer games with a joystick! I've been using a gamepad for so many years at this point that it just feels natural to play everything with one, but many of the old machines set up at the museum had period-appropriate joysticks attached, just as we would have used back in the day. Most of the joysticks appeared to be the Quickshot I, which is not a joystick I had ever used before, but I found it very comfortable and pleasant to use on a variety of games, with it proving particularly enjoyable for Paul Woakes' classic Encounter! on Atari 8-bit.

We had a mix of different joysticks for the Atari 8-bit and ST when I was growing up. Some of them were better than others; some of them were much more reliable than others, but I have fond memories of pretty much all of them. Here's a selection from what I can remember:

This is the Wico Command Control. This was probably one of the first joysticks I used, and it's nice. It stands out for its use of leaf switches rather than the more commonly used (and cheaper?) microswitches found in many other joysticks — in simple terms, this means that there's a bit more of a smoother movement to the stick and no distinctive "click", but it's still precise and sturdy. Unfortunately, the unit I have has suffered various issues over the years, including one or both of its fire buttons failing to work properly — they probably just need a decent clean, as this stick is renowned for being reliable.

There are a couple of other variants available, including a bat top version and an ergonomic grip, but we had (well, I still have, somewhere) the ball top version depicted here. When it works, it's very nice to have the option of the stick-top fire button as well as the one on the base.

Spectravideo made a few joysticks in their "Quickshot" range that looked like this, and I think this one — the Quickshot II, or the SV-102 to its friends — is the one we had. This was the first clicky microswitch joystick we had, and it felt good in the hand thanks to it being designed to resemble a flightstick. Although it has both the trigger and stick-top buttons, because home computers only supported a single fire button, they both did the same thing, so it was simply a matter of comfort as to which one you used.

I was convinced for years that this joystick also had two buttons on its base, but from looking around a bit, I might have been imagining that. Either that or another joystick company ripped off the Quickshot II and added two more buttons so it was legally distinct. Entirely possible. I would go and check, but it is in the loft and thus inaccessible without a joint effort between me and my wife, and we're both very tired.

This is the Atari Game Stick 2, which I believe was the pack-in controller for the Atari 7800 in some territories. It has a nice visual design and is reasonably pleasant to hold in the hand, but it turned out to be quite unreliable, particularly in the fire button department. Apparently this is quite a widely known issue; the contacts for the fire buttons wear out quite quickly, leading to them either being non-responsive or "sticking", both of which are symptoms I have experienced with this stick. This was never my favourite to use, even when it was working, but I do have a lot of time for the brushed metal Atari logo with rainbow stripe.

This ridiculous looking thing, often referred to in magazines of the time as "the Coathook", is the Konix Navigator, and contrary to what you might expect from such a strange design, it was actually very comfortable to use — though the fact it lacked a base meant that you needed two hands to use it, making it less practical for anything which also required keyboard buttons for, say, smart bombs or something. It felt really nice in the hand, though; the curved grip was ergonomic, the stick had a nice click to it, and the trigger-type fire button was enjoyable to press. Plus the fact it looked like a Star Trek phaser was pretty cool.

This one, I think, lasted a lot longer than many of our other joysticks, though I believe it eventually broke. It's probably fixable, but again, I've never looked into how to go about doing that. One day, perhaps.

This is the Zipstik, which is extremely well regarded as one of the best and most reliable joysticks from the 8-bit and 16-bit home computer eras. It had a solid, clicky, arcade-style joystick and two study fire buttons, and could stand up to a lot of punishment. It is, so far as I am aware, unrelated to another joystick named the Zipstik Competition Joystick, which I don't know anything about but rather like the design of. Out of all the joysticks I owned for classic systems, this is the one that lasted the longest. I'm pretty sure if I were to get it out of the loft right now, it would still work just fine.

Finally, a "dream" joystick — not one I actually owned. This is the Quickshot Superboard, which just looks amazing. Look at all those completely unnecessary fire buttons that all do the same thing due to the aforementioned limitation! Look at the little LCD screen with the stopwatch and countdown timer! Look at all the switches! This thing is cool, and I always lusted after it when I saw it in magazines, but I never owned one. And it probably isn't actually very good. But I still kind of want one. Maybe I'll have to have a look on eBay…

Anyway, my pleasant experiences at the museum this weekend have encouraged me to get some sort of joystick setup up and running for my MiSTer. Whether this takes the form of getting a SNAC cartridge/control dock/USB adapter to use classic hardware, or a modern USB-based recreation? That, I haven't decided yet, but I feel oddly excited about, to borrow the name of a thoroughly nice chap and fellow Atari enthusiast's YouTube channel and newsletter, the joy of sticks.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 890: A thoroughly agreeable day

I am very tired and writing this on my phone from bed, so this will probably be brief. Normal business will resume once I am at home tomorrow!

Today I attended the Retro Computer Festival at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge. I took some Evercade bits and pieces, but not in a "professional" or official capacity, just as an enthusiast. It was good fun! There was a lot of interest in the Alpha arcade units in particular, but everyone liked the look of the Nexus, too.

The whole thing was just a nice atmosphere, and despite the event largely being populated by "people from the Internet", one thing that struck me as the day went on was that interacting with people and the stuff on display was about as far removed from arguing with people online as it's possible to get.

I mean it! It was a thoroughly pleasant experience. No snarky comments, no people trying to score clout points, just a group of enthusiasts who love their hobby and are delighted to have an opportunity to share it with others in such a nice environment.

Because, yes, the Centre for Computing History is a really cool place. I'd not been before, and I had been meaning to check it out for ages, but had never gotten around to it. This weekend's event seemed like a good opportunity to do so — it also doubled as a chance to catch up with my friends, as I did last night, and to hang out with some people I mostly know from Online in the daytime today.

I think my feelings about the overall positivity of the day stem from the fact that the people who drum up the most negativity online — the people who really make it a chore to be on social media or look at a comments section — are just… not actually all that involved in the hobby they spend their time ranting and raving about. There was no sign of the sort of person who makes juvenile comments about home computer platforms they personally don't like in attendance today, while one of our number had one such tool in their YouTube comments that we all had a good laugh at.

Nope; everyone there today was open to experiencing new things, learning something or just understanding other people's appreciation for their niche within a niche. It was thoroughly pleasant, and I highly recommend going along to an event like this if you ever find yourself despairing a bit about your hobbies.

So yeah. That was my day. Now I really need a good sleep!

#oneaday Day 889: A thoroughly agreeable evening

Spent the evening with some old friends I haven't seen for ages — and I get the impression that despite us all being in a group chat together, they hadn't just hung out with one another for an evening for some time, either. So not only did I have a pleasant evening, I also feel like I did a certain amount of good by bringing people together.

It was a pretty simple evening, nothing fancy, and definitely no getting absolutely hammered like in years gone by. I did drink two large bottles of Smirnoff Ice, however, and didn't really feel much effect. Disappointing? Perhaps, but getting plastered was not the objective for the evening. It would have probably been inadvisable, even, given the fact I have to be up early for tomorrow's happenings.

We just hung out like it was old times, and it was like the last 20+ years had never passed. We played video games, we stayed up too late, we had conversations far too offensive to print here. This is good. This is exactly what I needed. This is what I have been missing for a frustratingly long period of time.

There's this assumption that you "grow out" of childish things, but if this evening proved one thing, it's that you absolutely do not have to — even if you're married, as two of the three of us are, and even if you have kids, as one of us does. (If you'd asked me which one of us was the most likely to have kids 20 years ago, it would not have been the one who now does have kids, but life rarely goes the way you expect, as both bitter and sweet experiences over the years have taught me.)

One interesting side-effect of the evening is that, having been re-watching a lot of the Game Grumps Super Mario Maker series recently, I thought I would introduce my friends to Super Mario Maker 2. I am normally not a big fan of the absurdly difficult levels — I even wrote about how I dislike how so much of that game's culture revolves around super-hard levels — but attempting (and eventually succeeding!) at beating a particularly troublesome level this evening formed a nice centrepiece for the other activities.

One of my friends was also a big fan of the Street Fighter edition Evercade Alpha, so I may have made a sale there. Even if not, he seemed to have a blast playing through Champion Edition over the course of the evening.

So all in all, this evening was pretty much everything I hoped it would be, and now I am heading to bed, far too late to be practical for an early start tomorrow, feeling more content and happy than I have done for quite some time.

Almost like you should do this sort of thing more often. Who'd have thought it?!

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#oneaday Day 888: Movieretro

One thing I've been considering doing for quite a while, particularly since second-hand physical media is often very cheap these days, is revisiting a bunch of movies that I remember watching and enjoying as a kid. In many cases, I haven't seen these movies since being a kid, so I am quite curious to see how many of them hold up from a modern perspective as a kind-of sort-of "grown up".

I haven't got around to doing anything about this yet, mind, because I tend to find when I get into a place with a bunch of DVDs (CEX, say) I often find myself agonising over the amount of choice available, and also wondering if I will ever actually make the time to sit down and watch these movies, were I to buy them. I have several anime box sets that I have never watched, for example.

This is all just a matter of self-control and taking ownership of your free time, however. I used to be good at this! Back at university, I remember I spent quite a lot of my time watching and re-watching favourite movies — I had about five DVDs, so I watched The Matrix, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch a whole lot — and still had plenty of time to go out and socialise, do my university work and still play video games. So what is stopping me now? Absolutely nothing, that's what.

Well, okay. One think is a mild inconvenience to this plan, and that is the fact that some combination of the labyrinthine combination of HDMI cables tucked away behind the TV in the living room means that I do not, in fact, have anything connected to the television that is capable of playing a DVD or Blu-Ray without running afoul of anti-piracy measures such as HDCP or that weird thing where the PS2 would turn DVDs green. I have fixed this in the past with the simple purchase of an external DVD drive for the PC, but the one that I bought appears to have packed up, so if I want to do this again, I will need to purchase another one.

The alternative, of course, is to just watch them on the PS4 in the bedroom, which does quite happily play DVDs and Blu-Rays without issue, but sometimes you want to watch in the living room, not the bedroom, you know? It's very much a first world problem, I know, but it is a bit annoying.

But what to watch? Well, there are a whole bunch that spring to mind. I'm sure at least some of these are probably regarded as "problematic" (ugh) by modern audiences, but I remember watching and enjoying these as a kid, and I would very much be open to the idea of revisiting them. In no particular order:

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
Batteries Not Included
Short Circuit/Short Circuit 2
Flight of the Navigator
The Last Starfighter
Look Who's Talking/Look Who's Talking Too
Ghostbusters/Ghostbusters II
The Back to the Future trilogy
The Cat From Outer Space

I'm sure there are more, but those are the ones off the top of my head. To add to all that, there's a whole bunch of '80s and early '90s movies that my friends at school went apeshit for (often before they were "old enough" to watch them, certificate-wise) that I feel I probably "should" catch up on at some point, for the sake of having some sort of cultural understanding:

The Terminator/Terminator 2 (I've seen one of these, possibly the first one?)
Various Rocky movies
Various Rambo movies
Anything involving Bruce Lee
Robocop

I'm drawing a blank on anything beyond that, though. Suggestions are welcome! At some point I might even watch some of them. It'll give me something to write about if nothing else, right?

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#oneaday Day 887: PREVIEWS of FORTHCOMING ATTRACTIONS

Recorded and edited a bunch of videos over the course of the last few days, to be released over the course of the next few weeks. The first one is out right now, in fact. Go see me revisit the Atari 8-bit version of David Crane's Ghostbusters game right here!

These recording sessions have thrown up a nice mix of games that I've enjoyed exploring. We kicked off with the aforementioned Ghostbusters, which is a great game that is still pretty enjoyable to play — though I'm definitely out of practice. It's a solid example of how to do a good movie license game: rather than adapting the story of the movie slavishly, you simply make something that fits in with the overall vibe and concepts of the license, and do something creative from there. Ghostbusters works well not because it's a good adaptation of the movie specifically, but because it's a good game about being the Ghostbusters.

Also on Atari 8-bit, I took a look at a shoot 'em up called Humanoid that was a very late release from a Polish developer, and appears to be a game that has "borrowed" (or possibly stolen?) all the graphics from Hewson's Subterranea and bunged them into a game that is a little bit different. I couldn't find the story behind this one, so I do find myself wondering if it started life as an official port of Subterranea that was subsequently cancelled, then they figured they might as well do something with the work that had already been done. Waste not, want not and all that.

Finally on the Atari 8-bit front, I took a look at a type-in listing from ANALOG magazine called Incoming! This is a very simple game in which you control a rotating but immobile machine gun turret, and have to blast down aerial targets. It initially appears simple, but gets impressively frantic as the stages progress, and there's a lot more to it than just simple blasting. Losing points for each shot fired forces you to be tactical, and the stages alternating between dropping paratroopers and city blocks on you keeps things thoroughly interesting along the way.

Switching over to the ST, I actually ended up recording four videos because when preparing my "A to Z" I inadvertently skipped the letter "E" completely accidentally, so I had to fit something in. First up, though, came "D", and I finally took a look at Driller, the first of the "Freescape" 3D games. I've been putting off exploring this one because even after reading the manual I didn't really understand how to play it, but having actually spent some time with it now I have a much better understanding of it.

The "E" I quickly had to fit in took the form of Paul Woakes' excellent port of his classic Encounter! to the Atari ST. This is a lot better than I remember, and I really enjoyed spending some time with this one. I love the 8-bit version but always had somewhat mixed memories of the ST version. Turns out that was mostly in my head; the ST version is excellent.

For "F" I brought in an all-time favourite: Flood by Bullfrog. This is an oft-forgotten part of the legendary studio's heritage, but it's a perfect example of what they brought to the table in the 16-bit era: lots of audio-visual polish and solid gameplay that provides interesting twists on conventional formulae. Flood is a platform game at heart, but its little tweaks to the basic genre standard make it thoroughly enjoyable, and still a lot of fun to play today.

Finally, for "G" I took on The Grail, a showcase title for the Talespin adventure game creation software package. While The Grail is only middling as a game in its own right, its existence as a quasi-visual novel long before any of the Japanese visual novels ever made it to the West is thoroughly intriguing to me — and makes me want to check out the Talespin software itself in its own right.

Anyway, all those are rendering and uploading now, so I think I can say I've had a nice, productive day. Now I think it's time to settle down for a few hours of Zelda! I've definitely earned them.

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#oneaday Day 886: Non-celebratory party

When times feel bleak and difficult, it is sometimes nice to retreat into the past in your own way, and think about some enjoyable or at least interesting times you remember fondly. For me, some of the most memorable occasions in my Past Life involved parties.

Growing up, as a kid, I always worked on the sort of assumption that a "party" was a celebratory thing you did when there was a particular occasion to… well, celebrate. Usually a birthday. I remember several birthday parties I attended as a child, usually at the "Reading Room" in the village, and they typically involved playing Pass the Parcel, that weird game where you had to put on a coat, scarf and hat and then eat a chocolate bar with a knife and fork, and, on a couple of occasions, actual entertainers. This kind of party I associate with cake, for probably obvious reasons.

As you get a bit older, though, the "celebration" bit of parties fades in favour of it simply being a "social gathering" of sorts. I must confess I still have the somewhat childish definition in my head whenever I hear the word "party", but, of course, I have experienced non-celebratory parties on a number of occasions in the past.

A lot of these occasions from my university days sort of blur into one another at this point, because the non-celebratory party, in my experience, tended to be an occasion with one primary activity: drinking until your brain spontaneously combusted. As such, many of my memories of parties from that period are somewhat fragmented, and I'm not sure what happened at which party. I guess it doesn't matter all that much; all that really does matter is that the experience happened, and I, for one reason or another, happen to remember it.

One party I do remember with a certain degree of specificity is an occasion when we, for some reason, ended up around at "Geography Beki's" house. I didn't know Geography Beki well — she was a classmate of one of my friends, so I had encountered her a couple of times, but not to any degree beyond "passing acquaintance" — but somehow everyone from my immediate friendship group ended up attending this party.

As parties went, it was relatively unremarkable, as I recall. The highlight of the evening was getting slowly more and more drunk in someone's bedroom, repeatedly listening to one track on Moby's Play album, because one of our number kept yelling "TRACK FIVE!" every time track five came to its conclusion. I say "highlight" of the evening; what I really mean is "this is the only thing I really remember in any great detail".

Another party I remember in somewhat blurry detail is one where I'm not even sure whose house it was or what I was doing there; my sole recollection of it was someone — possibly me, though I'm not even entirely sure of that — being sick out of a bedroom window and onto the corrugated plastic roof of the conservatory below. I believe a mop was hung out of the window in an attempt to get rid of the worst of the mess before it became a permanent feature on the rooftop.

Thinking about it, this may have been the same party at which two of my friends, each of whom were attending some form of martial arts club at the university, decided to try some moves on one another, and it escalated into at least one of the pair taking things rather more seriously than the event warranted. I recall the friend in question having an oddly furious look on their face, while the other just looked sort of bemused and amused at what was unfolding. It ended without any permanent damage happening to either of them.

These little events are all minor, stupid things, but I remember those moments oddly vividly, more than 20 years later in many cases. I don't really know why, either; I wouldn't describe them as particularly noteworthy incidents and definitely not things that went on to shape who I am today. But I do sort of miss them; I do sort of miss the normality of a whole bunch of people bundling around someone's house for no other reason than 1) it gave them somewhere out of the ordinary to get plastered and 2) perhaps to hang out with people whose company they could, at the very least, tolerate.

I don't know if I could handle a party like that these days. Probably not; as a socially anxious person, I often didn't handle those parties back then in the best way, and that social anxiety has only developed as I've got older and the Way The World Is has just pushed us all further apart from one another. But I still sort of miss them. If I could go back, I would probably try and enjoy those occasions a little more; evidently something about those times has remained precious enough to me to remember them for this long.

But anyway. I guess my meetup with my friends on Friday is going to be an extremely small-scale non-celebratory party of sorts. Except the only people in attendance are people I know and like. Sounds like an ideal solution to me!

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#oneaday Day 885: A day off is different from the weekend

I am, as I have previously noted, On Holiday this week. On Holiday in the sense that "I don't have to work" rather than "I am going anywhere", although I am taking a trip back to East Anglia towards the end of the week for various things I talked about the other day.

Today has been a day of pretty much nothing but Zelda, which means I don't have a whole lot to talk about other than Zelda, but I shall resist doing so for now as there has been a lot of Zelda recently. Instead, I thought I'd talk about how a midweek day off always feels just a little bit different from the weekend.

I'm not really sure why this is. I think it's most likely to do with the fact that you know under normal circumstances, at this time you would be doing work, but right now, you have no obligations. That, in itself, makes it feel like a separate and distinct thing — and, in my mind, made me feel like "I have earned a day off". Hence, the aforementioned day of nothing but Zelda.

But a day off from what if I'm already not working? Well, anything, really. I have some videos scripted and ready to record, but I thought about doing them today and my mind just went "nope, do as little as possible today", so for once I listened to it without guilt and did exactly that. I will probably make a start on these videos tomorrow.

In these busy, perpetually online days where at times it can feel like your whole life is on display whether or not you want it to be, it's easy to feel like you "should" constantly be "doing something". This is particularly true if you are someone who enjoys making things and posting them online — be they articles, videos, podcasts, anything like that. It's very easy to succumb to the temptation that "everything must be content" — when in fact, it's perfectly fine for some, even all of the things you do for fun, to be just for you.

I mean, yes, I am almost definitely going to write about Zelda when I've finished it, but writing about the games I have played is part of my process of enjoying them at this point. It helps me to reflect on what I've just played, what I liked about it, and it also, in years to come, serves as a record of the things I've enjoyed and the experiences I've had. It's nice to look back on all this, because it's surprisingly easy to forget individual things that you've spent your time doing as the years go by.

But aside from the knowledge I will write something up when I've finished Zelda (and likewise Final Fantasy Resonance), I am not worrying about turning these things into "content". I don't need to add another Zelda video to YouTube as there are almost certainly hundreds, thousands already. One might argue that, therefore, I don't need to add another Zelda article to the mix, either, but for me, posting a video and posting an article are two quite different things; the former requires a lot of forward planning to ensure I get the footage I want, while the latter is something I can do much more "on the fly" once I'm finished with something. And, as I say, it's basically part of my "hobby process" now, anyway; writing about the game and contemplating it after I've finished is as much a part of the routine as simply experiencing the thing.

Anyway, this is a lot of words to say I didn't really feel like making any videos today, so I didn't do that. I have enjoyed my day, regardless, and I feel somewhat revitalised to tackle the self-imposed challenges ahead of me tomorrow!

For now, though, back to Zelda…

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#oneaday Day 884: No more resisting. I am a Zelda fan

I have written about this a number of times in the past (most recently exactly a year ago, weirdly), but I think it's time to admit once and for all that I am, in fact, a fan of The Legend of Zelda.

This is not a controversial opinion, I know, but let me talk about it a little bit, because I find my own response to the series kind of interesting. I have, over the years, convinced myself that I am a bit "meh" on Zelda as a whole, and I'm not entirely sure why, given how I've always had a good time with it. With the recent Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time, though, there really is no mistaking it: The Legend of Zelda is, to me, one of the greatest series of video games ever created, and continues to be wonderful to this day, with nary a misstep to its name (aside from the CD-i games, but those don't really count).

(This is not an invitation for you to tell me how much you don't like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. I don't care.)

I mentioned in my post last year that a lot of my… resistance, I guess you'd call it? Yeah. A lot of my resistance to the series over the years stems from that period when Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time were both the "big games" that my friends and I were playing through at almost the same time.

Final Fantasy VII had blown us all away with its spectacular, cinematic, deep and lengthy story and — to us as RPG newbies, anyway — unusual, interesting gameplay. Ocarina of Time, meanwhile, while undoubtedly a good game, just didn't feel quite as… impressive to our shallow, ill-informed eyes. We used to joke that after playing Final Fantasy VII, my friend Woody refused to believe that any game that came on fewer than three CDs would ever be any good — but we all secretly sort of felt something similar. Although in retrospect it's impressive quite what Ocarina of Time managed to achieve in 32MB of cartridge space — compared to Final Fantasy VII's three CDs, most of which were filled with FMV sequences — at the time it was hard not to feel like it was a bit less overtly… wow.

Then there was the "inverse hype" problem, where for a very long time prior to Ocarina of Time's release, it was hyped up as being akin to the Second Coming of Jesus, like all other video games were going to cease to matter; as if just standing within the shadow of Zelda 64 (as it was known prior to the Ocarina of Time subtitle being revealed) would cause every other game to spontaneously turn to dust and scatter on the wind. On the one hand, if you bought into this, it was exciting, but at the same time, it did, at times, feel a little excessive — especially for those of us who, at the time, had both PlayStations and Nintendo 64s and thus felt no real need for fanboyism or favouring one platform over another. Eventually, it just got kind of exhausting.

Looking back, of course, it was silly to compare Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time, as they're both very different kinds of game that can — and do — quite happily coexist. Knowing that also allows me to view the Ocarina of Time remake on Switch 2 through relatively clear eyes. And you know what it's teaching me? I've actually always liked Ocarina of Time a lot more than I had previously thought or cared to admit.

You might think that this is just the shiny new remake talking — but honestly, the remake is so true to the N64 original in terms of structure and gameplay that it is helping me appreciate and remember things about the older incarnation — things that are amplified, but not changed, in the remake. Consequently, I know that if I were to boot up the N64 version right now, I'd have as good a time with it as I am with the Switch 2 version.

Like, for example, I'm sure there are at least some of you out there who have always thought Zelda is kind of twee nonsense. Little fairy kid with pointy ears skips through the forest and beats a big bad guy? Childish nonsense, surely. But no; spend some time with the Zelda series as a whole and you'll develop a firm appreciation of the fact that it is actually surprisingly dark on a fairly consistent basis — with Ocarina of Time, in many ways, being second only to its direct follow-up, Majora's Mask, in terms of moodiness.

I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to say the game has been designed with adults in mind, which is something I would say about the Metroid series, but there is definitely a strong amount of "fairy tale fucked-upness" about Zelda that, with my old and jaded eyes, I feel that if anything, I am appreciating more now than I ever did back in the day. It's the subtle things; the things that you wouldn't necessarily notice as a wide-eyed child, but which you appreciate as a cynical adult. Especially, yes, That Bombchu Lady.

And when I think back on the time I have spent with the Zelda series over the years, I can honestly say that I've never had a bad time with a Zelda game. This curious sense of "resistance" that I describe above sometimes prevents me from making much progress with them — particularly the sprawling quests of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom — but, partway through Ocarina of Time as I am right now, I think I can quite comfortably and confidently say that yes, I am, in fact, a Zelda fan, and I really should get it out of my head that I am somehow not. And then, after I'm done with Ocarina of Time, finally get around to scratching Tears of the Kingdom off my "to complete" list, too.

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#oneaday Day 883: Just like old times... hopefully

I have the coming week off work. I am going to spend most of it just chilling and relaxing, because it's been an intense, stressful few months for various reasons, but towards the end of the time I am doing a few things: stopping by to visit my parents, attending the Retro Computer Festival at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge (I will be bringing Evercades of various descriptions, though I will not be there in a "professional" capacity, just as an enthusiast), and, arguably most importantly in my head, I am seeing a couple of friends from my school days that I haven't seen for a good few years at this point.

This little encounter is actually quite important to me, because as those of you who know me reasonably well will probably know, I have had some… difficult experiences with people I thought were my friends of late, and that has left me feeling rather depressed, distrustful and hesitant to "let people in" — or perhaps to open myself up, to put it another way. It is something that, unsurprisingly, I have talked about a lot at therapy. Over the course of those discussions it has become clear — well, even clearer than it was — that I have been hurt by those experiences, and that, in turn, has left me feeling lonely, not great about myself generally, and somewhat adrift in terms of just… having people to hang out with.

I don't ask for much from friendships: just some people that I can see every so often, share some good times with and, ideally, share in the experience of the hobbies that we have always found enjoyable together. A willing ear during turbulent times is helpful, but to be honest, it's the first bit that I most keenly feel the absence of in my life right now; I just want to be able to share the things I love — and that, in some cases, I am proud to have been part of — with people I care about. Some of my fondest memories from the years and decades gone by are not big, huge, exciting events, but times I spent at someone's house, just hanging out, possibly intoxicating ourselves via various means, playing video games and making stupid jokes together. These days I can live without the intoxication part, but the other bits I really miss.

Which is why I'm quietly excited about this little meet-up that is happening next week. It's just a couple of friends and, again, we're not doing anything big: just piling around someone's house, hanging out, playing some games and probably having a few drinks. It will be the first time I have done this with people I regard as "old friends" for quite a long time; my wife and I have been enjoying playing some HeroQuest with a mutual friend (someone she knew and introduced me to, who has now become a "shared friend", as it were), so it's not as if I've been completely without social contact, but that has been an occasional thing up until now. (That reminds me; I should probably arrange the next session of that.)

I don't know what the evening will hold. I'm hoping to introduce my friends to the stuff I've been doing with Evercade, firstly because it's stuff I'm super-proud to have worked on, but also (mainly) because there's a bunch of multiplayer stuff, particularly from among the NEOGEO cartridges, that I think it would be fun to spend some time with — and I get the chance so rarely to be able to actually play this stuff with other people that I'm really excited about the possibility. I can see Doom going down particularly well. The Instagib mode we added is insanely fun and the only chance I've had to play it was when we were testing it in the office!

But anyway. Spend some time with the people you have, in the past, called your "friends". Just drop them a text or something if you don't have the time to hang out. I can guarantee they'll appreciate it.

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#oneaday Day 882: The Maybe-Returner

I don't know if I'm going to go back to Final Fantasy XIV. I have had some wonderful times in that game — I proposed to my wife for real during our in-game wedding! — and every time I hear the soundtrack I feel an urge to reinstall and resub. But I don't know.

I have a few reasons for feeling a bit mixed on whether or not I want to go back. First and probably foremost is the fact that I'm very aware that, for several years, it completely dominated my gaming time. I don't resent the time I spent with wonderful people enjoying the game during that period — but I have always found it difficult to get that elusive "balance" between being able to enjoy a big, deep, time-consuming game like Final Fantasy XIV and still having a varied gaming diet elsewhere. There are a lot of games I still want to play, and I just worry that getting back into FFXIV — like really back into it — will mean I just never get to them.

The second is that I soured on the broader community as time went on. When I first started playing, the FFXIV community was one of the most friendly, welcoming, helpful communities I had ever played with, and this helped enormously with the sense of anxiety I felt over partying up with strangers for Dungeons and Trials. I even spent a bit of time as a tank class — in many ways the de facto "leader" of most groups, given that it is they who set the pace for everyone else — which is something I never thought I'd do.

Over time, though, things started to change. A lot of players started caring more about "efficiency" than enjoying the game. They'd speedrun through dungeons, pulling multiple groups of monsters at once and making the individual encounters considerably less interesting. They'd get pissy and abusive at anyone who wanted to enjoy the experience at a more leisurely pace. They ruined a potentially interesting mechanic called "The Hunt" by zergrushing every enemy that appeared as part of it with massive groups organised on Discord servers using bots. They made it nigh-essential to have spreadsheets and wikis open while you played certain parts of the game, rather than allowing you to enjoy it in a more freeform nature.

Granted, a lot of the game can now be enjoyed properly solo thanks to the Duty Support and Trust systems, but when you get to endgame, if you want to enjoy the raid storylines — which are often great! — you will still have to play with others. And, to a not-insignificant portion of the community, it seems there is only one way to play. The not-fun way.

The third is that prior to Dawntrail coming out, I ploughed through a New Game Plus run and straight into the expansions I hadn't yet done (Shadowbringers and Endwalker), burning myself out quite severely in the process. As part of this process, I started finding myself dreading the increasingly predictable structure of the game: go to new settlement, do story quest, suddenly sidequests pop up everywhere in the settlement. Do sidequests, advance main story a bit, suddenly a second set of sidequests pop up. Repeat until you get a bit of variation from a Dungeon or Trial. It got to a point where it just felt like exploring the world was becoming a bit of a chore, because there was no real danger from the enemies you'd encounter in the field, and nothing really to "find" other than the stuff you had marked on your map as quest objectives.

The third one is very much a "your mileage may vary" sort of scenario, I'm aware, and it may just have been that rushing through all those story quests made me cynical about the way the game is structured. It didn't prevent me from enjoying the game, and indeed the finale of Endwalker brought me to tears. I just didn't like feeling so cynical about a game that had been such an important part of my life for so long.

Thus, I'm rather torn about whether or not I'll go back for Evercold. Right now, I just don't really feel anything in the way of excitement for it, but at least part of that is down to simply not paying any attention to anything Final Fantasy XIV-related since the base story of Dawntrail. The rest is down to enjoying the varied gaming experiences I'm having away from FFXIV right now, and not wanting to end up back in a position where my own lack of self-control makes it difficult to still have those while playing FFXIV.

I'm probably overthinking it. I overthink a lot of things. I know I would go back in a heartbeat if I was able to help friends who had never played it before do a "story run" through the various main scenarios. But going back "just for me"? I'm not sure I have it in me.

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